The adult game crackdown is "ridiculous for our art form", say Hellraiser devs, but they think they'll survive thanks to that Clive Barker association

Last year, Australian anti-porn group Collective Shout pressured payment processors, such as Mastercard, Paypal, Visa, and Paysafe Limited to withdraw their services from Steam and Itch.io if the stores didn't remove adult games from their shelves. The campaign was successful and many games were impacted. The campaign's had a chilling effect, leaving developers making games including any sexual content in a kind of limbo as to whether digital storefronts will host their work. Some are ushered through without issue, while others are banned with little recourse.

Just last week, we saw how Valve blocked Molleindustria's Future? No Thanks! due to its scenes of minor nudity. Then, only after public lobbying, did they manage to get Valve to reconsider and rescind their ban.

So, after playing a half hour demo of Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival, a demo set almost entirely inside a fetish club, and one featuring male nudity, female nudity, and some pretty sexually explicit content, I asked the developers if they were worried about a Steam ban or if it had led to any changes to the game.

"It happened, and it spooked us, but we didn't make any changes," narrative director Antony de Fault says of the vents last year. "The situation didn't seem to get any worse and, honestly, I'd forgotten about it for the last six or seven months. So no, it didn't really factor in, other than I think it's ridiculous for our art form."

"For us, it's maybe a bit easier because Hellraiser is an established IP," game director Emil Esov continues. "It comes with the territory where you work in this universe. It would be much harder for an original IP, then you need to justify more and you may get challenged more."

"It's like Hellraiser, by already existing since the 80s, is grandfathered in," de Fault adds. "It gives us permission to continue to play in that sandbox. People already know what it is, they're not freshly having the conversation of figuring out what Hellraiser is, so I think we avoided it a bit."

Image credit: Saber Interactive

However, while Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival will be launched on Steam on October 8, it won't be on sale everywhere. While I was playing the horror game at Gamescom in Germany, developer and publisher Saber Interactive are still trying to get an age classification allowing it to be sold there, and in other territories, such as Japan, they've not even submitted the game for classification. Illfonic recently revealed the trouble they've had acquiring a Japanese certification for Halloween: The Game, so much so they've cancelled the PS5 release in the territory.

"Honestly, we didn't think about it that much," de Fault answers when I ask how certification impacted what content did (or didn't) make it into Hellraiser. "It was just really important that we didn't compromise and that we made what Hellraiser should be. The entire reason to do a Hellraiser game is its unique flavour of horror. It deals with these themes that other video games daren't approach. If we were to shrink away from that, it would be self-defeating, you wouldn't have a leg to stand on to say this is a unique experience. It was never a question of not doing it. It was more a question of what do we actually want to say with this game?"

As to what that is, I've a piece on how the Hellraiser devs are exploring the male and female gaze in fetish culture later this week.